Massacre in the Kitchen

Not long ago, Kyle declared an open-ended moratorium on vegetables.  All vegetables.  Even cucumbers, the last vegetable he would actually eat.  We even grew them in our garden this summer.  With our own Stewart’s two hands.

After a series of heated dinnertime battles that would have really interested the faithful viewers of the Ragu series I did, I finally gave up.  The new rule:  eat what I serve you or you don’t get dessert.  I don’t always serve vegetables, but when I do, I’m serious.  No dessert.

In the meantime I have been plotting to hide vegetables in his food – and Brady’s by default – using Jessica Seinfeld’s recipes from Deceptively Delicious.  Since I know Kyle loves pancakes, I decided to try her “pink pancakes” made with regular pancake mix and beet puree.

Here’s the thing.  I’ve always hated beets.  The only beets I was ever exposed to were the canned kind, so I decided to try this from scratch.  I’ve never actually purchased any form of beet, ever.  At the grocery store, I realized I didn’t even know what an uncooked beet looked like.  Would they be in the potato section of the produce aisle?  The turnips or rutabagas?  Nothing there was labeled “beet,” and I was unsure enough of this situation that I did not simply substitute it with a sort-of-like-it vegetable the way I normally would.

I finally found the last bunch of beets in the organic section.  They looked exactly like this:

To make the puree, I chopped the stems and roots off, covered each beet (I had four) in foil, and roasted them at 400 degrees for one hour.  The house filled with the smell of dirt.

Once the beets cooled and I peeled them and sliced off a tiny bit to taste, I realized they also taste like dirt.  Why do people eat these things?  Because they are pretty?  Meh.  To each his own.

Anyway, despite my distaste for even organic, lovingly-roasted beets, I was determined to foist them upon my children.  I pureed the beets with water, then proceeded to mix some of the puree into the pancake batter and proceed as usual.

The problem, I think, is that in my frenzy of healthy-food-creating, I bought whole wheat and corn meal pancake mix, which is mealy and coarse, unlike the smooth operator that is Bisquick, which I normally use.  So I wound up with fuchsia, dirt-smelling johnnycakes.

Covered with fake maple syrup, they weren’t bad.  Kyle actually ate them.  Here is the proof:

Brady wouldn’t even go near them, much less give them a taste.  I gotta say, smart kid.  I ate my own fair share of the pink pancakes, but I didn’t enjoy them nearly as much as the other whacked out pancakes I like to make – oatmeal cottage cheese pancakes from the South Beach Diet cookbook.

Plus, the cleanup was a bitch.